Being a research project, based on long term preoccupations with social-architectural phenomena, DEVOUR! blends the work of artists with architects, collectives and curators to follow the emergence of architectural or urbanistic hybrid situations, as a consequence of processes of what could be called cultural and social anthropophagy. The project touches on various contexts in which hybrid structures and practices emerge - legacy of processes of social cannibalism: devoration, imposed absorbtion of cultural paradigma, unassimilated consumption. Their monstrous, sacrificial, suicidal, but also innovatory outcomes focused on architecture and living practices, permeate this project.

A hybrid is exposing by its very nature the interaction of its incongruous sources. It is the outcome of a missed assimilation, an unsuccessful crossbreeding that nevertheless powered a new entity, which carries a strong political relevance and fuels a new configuration.

The exhibition at Freies Museum delves into such paradigmatic cases in which present mutated and dysfunctional structures (buildings, environments, living situations and imaginary environments) are revealed to be late consequence of lingering Eurocentric spatialisation and its often abusive consequences. At the same time, theese cases carry the regenerative power that shifts thinking patterns and converts to new historical paradigms. Historic and archival material will be blended with contemporary artistic work.

The entire project and this exhibition circle around the Brazilian early modernist notion of anthropophagy and its emancipatory potential, which accompanied the emergence of postcolonial regenerative thinking and triggered a material shape to an utopic architecture that was to create a new social identity.

In his Anthropophagic Manifesto of 1928, in Sao Paulo, Oswald de Andrade touches - with a mix of suprarealism, lucid criticality and malice - on fundamental sore points present in the epoch: “I asked a man what Law was. He answered it was the assurance of the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Matias. I ate him.” According to critics from the epoch, Galli Matias alludes with a play of words, to an Eurocentric confused and self-propagating discourse. De Andrade also declares to be “Against all importers of canned consciousness', meaning induced socio-ethnological studies, imposed on the reality of the Brazilian cultures. "Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question," de Andrade also famously asked (in English) in his Manifesto. Cannibalism (and the figure of the indigenous Brazilian cannibal) was adopted as a metaphor for a new Brazilian identity that would devour and assimiliate European culture and the European impositions of models, along with the image of one's own cultural inheritance, to produce a native national art free of its colonial past.

In this way modernism became the formula for this postcolonial identity. On the other hand this architecture was also meant to create concrete, practical solutions for local living: inclusive environments and functional solutions for the necessities of a modern Brasilian.

Included in this exhibition, documentary material (images and texts) connect the Anthropophagic Manifesto of Oswald de Andrade with a few sources on Flavio de Carvalho – a Brazilian little known personality who fused in the 1950' architecture, urbanism and performance into social utopia.

Flávio de Carvalho (1899 – 1973) is best known for his Experiências. They are all staging situations that would determine a mutation of social rituals. Experiência no. 3, which is documented in this image collection, shows de Carvalho wearing his own designed futuristic new costume for men: a sort of functional architecture-dress that would provoke a freer and more climateric adequat movement in space. Besides his Experiências, de Carvalho was a prolific writer, architect, journalist and dramaturg. Architecture as a cultural structure that acts ‘upon the body’ is de Carvalho's vision, according to Inti Guerrero [1]. Maybe for the first time, performance (in a modern way) is blended here with urbanism, for a subjective experience of architecture. De Carvalho envisioned an utopian urban master plan, 'A cidade do homem nu' ('The City of the Naked Man'), imagined as a metropolis for the man of the future. In here the human should be without god, without property and without marriage, a 'naked mankind' stripped from its cultural constructs - or as Carvalho out it, from 'scholastic taboos' [2]

This collection of images presents also some of the remains of his realized architectures in Sao Paulo: Fazenda Capuava and the house complex of Alameda Lorena.

Associated to it, a projected video work of Jordi Colomer ('Anarchitekton Brazil', 2002-2004) – performs a de-fossilisation of this paradigmatic Brazilian architecture. A man carries the modernist buildings on his sholders and crosses the city running, temporary embodying their political identity.

The Brazilian modernism had important repercussions on the last decades of the colonial rule in African countries. Modernism in Africa was both an architecture of domination (via implanted European models) and a measure to fight against colonialist imposed habitation (via Brazilian modernist solutions with which (mostly) local architects tryed to adapt the European modernism to African necessieties. With Brazilian modenism, Portuguese speaking African countries were fighting the fascist architectural models of Antonio de Salazar imposed from Portugal. In the '50 and '60s (for example in Mozambique and Angola), local architects corroborated these European patterns with imported modernist building solutions from Brazil (of some decades earlier), addressing for the first time African local climateric conditions and necessities with plans defying hierarchical and exclusive use of space. These contributed to the formation of the so-called 'late modernity' in Africa, an empacipatory movement.

A collection of 4 documentaries will follow up some concrete late colonial buildings in their present state – hybrid environments which expose the megalomania and dysfunctionality of the late colonial projects, reflected back through their present consequences, on a both social and individual level. Each film presents a case study on architectures from Tanzania, Mosambique, Capo Verde and Johannesburg. These cases reveal at the same time also the regenerative agency of small-scale initiatives of their present inhabitants, which offer creative solutions from within. It becomes obvious in these cases how the contemporary architecture understood as spatial practice, constantly renews itself through topical initiatives, fighting against an architecture of domination.

The documentaries on the Grande Hotel Beira in Mosambique, the Ponte Building in Johannesbiurg, the vernacular housing colony of Santiago in Capo Verde and the first generation modernist architecture in Tanzania are part of the Lisbon film archive AfrikPlay (afrikplay.wordpress.com).

The works of Pedro Valdez Cardoso and Edouard Baribeaud, dive a century back into the second half of the 19th century when practices of travel meant (temporary) occupation linked to colonial exploration. Pedro Valdez Cardoso traces (in installation and abundant archival material) colonial encampment structures in Central Africa. These provisional architectural markers of territorial authority combine European military apparatus with local building techniques – a hybrid form that reflects superposed alphabets of power, reminiscences of traumatic and provisional living conditions, decayed relations and subjugation of the other's reality.

The collection of drawings of Edouard Baribeaud is combined with archival photography made by explorers in Brazil with their early photographic techniques (mostly from the Albert Richard Dietze (1838-1906) Collection and kindly borrowed by the Ibero American Institute, Berlin). Baribeaud's drawings are constructed on a dualistic principle, both on a formal level and regarding his motives (confrontation versus peace, sensorial vs. rational impulses, utopia and the imaginary vs. documentation). His drawings nevertheless are distancing themselves from these much contested binary principles (especially when these are associated with geographical separations and presumed cultural poles). He breaks and abstractizes this historic Eurocentric imaginary and together with it, its political charge, by introducing empty zones, what he calls 'projection screens'. This association of his work with explorer's photography follows also how the political agency of the medium of representation itself is reinforcing an anthropophagic context: the technical determinations of drawing or the first models of a camera – produce a crossbreed projective-fictional-documentary gaze on the encountered subject.

The Portuguese duo Pedro Paiva and Joao Maria Gusmao also work with the limits of observation and an inherently distorted assimilation of the reality of the Portuguese colonialism. The necessity of a hallucinatory dimension is seen as a possible catalyst for change, which is linking the individual back to a supposed immemorial (and for the European civilisation unaccessible) time. 'Columbus Column' and 'How to Swerve the Earth Axis' remind of iconic images of the Brazilian modernism, the link between de-colonising thoughts and utopian architecture and the delusive search for the center of the world. 'Hydraulics of Solids' (Man Eating Stones) is pointing to an impossible assimilation, or an intellectual absorbtion, complementing an orgiastic ingestion in 'Man Eating Papaya'.

e.Studio Luanda (http://www.e-studioluanda.com/) presents u.topia Luanda Machine, which is a kit of traveling boxes in which items of material culture are collected from the various stations in which the machine has 'worked'. Out if it, Francisco Vidal makes live paper and drawing performance. On the u.topia boxes a projection of diapositives record the performance of Rita GT in Luanda. These blind spots or censured moments are performed by her in paradigmatic places sites in the city of Luanda, in which the recent history of the city is visible: modernist architectural details from the colonial time in their present state of decay or transformation. e.Studio Luanda have worked in the past years in Luanda – a city which itself is a new hybrid functional model, destabilising any postcolonial polarisation. While Portuguese, Chinese, Eastern Europeans and Angolans alike in search for employment supra-populate Luanda, one of the most expensive capitals of the world, formal and informal economic practices are fusing into new urbanistic configurations.

Matias Machado reconstructs in real proportions a habitation quarter in Cordoba, Argentina, and records the changes that it went through in the past years, due to private and corrupt interests exercised there by multinational corporations. Monsanto had a forced extension in Cordoba and employed the population in abusive conditions, which was followed by an enormous amount of victims. Their homes are marked by Matias Machado on the model and two interviews with local activists discuss the consequence of these geopolitical interests. A constantly changing city plan (due to extension of Monsanto, that the population is forced to accept) reflects a continuous process of marginalisation, dissolvation and loss.

The world's only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties.

Tupy, or not tupy that is the question.1

Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi.

The only things that interest me are those that are not mine. Law of man. Law of the anthropophagite.

We are tired of all the suspicious catholic husbands put in drama. Freud put an end to the woman enigma and to other frights of printed psychology.

What hindered truth was clothing, the impermeable element between the interior world and the exterior world. The reaction against the dressed man. American movies will inform.

Sons of the sun, mother of the living. Found and loved ferociously, with all the hypocrisy of nostalgia, by the immigrants, by the slaves and by the touristes. In the country of the big snake.

It was because we never had grammars, nor collections of old plants. And we never knew what was urban, suburban, boundary and continental. Lazy men on the world map of Brazil. A participating consciousness, a religious rhythm.

Against all importers of canned consciousness. The palpable existence of life. And the pre-logical mentality for Mr. Levi Bruhl to study.

We want the Carahiba revolution. Bigger than the French Revolution. The unification of all efficacious rebellions in the direction of man. Without us Europe would not even have its poor declaration of the rights of man. The golden age proclaimed by America. The golden age. And all the girls.2

Descent. The contact with Carahiban Brazil. Oú Villegaignon print terre. Montaigne. The natural man. Rousseau. From the French Revolution to Romanticism, to the Bolshevik Revolution, to the surrealist Revolution and Keyserling's technicized barbarian. We walk.

We were never catechized. We live through a somnambular law. We made Christ be born in Bahia. Or in Belém do Pará.But we never admitted the birth of logic among us. Against Father Vieira. Author of our first loan, to gain his commission. The illiterate king had told him: put this in paper but don't be too wordy. The loan was made. Brazilian sugar was recorded. Vieira left the money in Portugal and brought us wordiness.

The spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without body. Anthropomorphism. The need for an anthropophagical vaccine. For the equilibrium against the religions of the meridian. And foreign inquisitions.

We can only attend to the oracular world.

We had justice codification of vengeance. And science codification of Magic. Anthropophagy. The permanent transformation of Taboo into totem.

Against the reversible world and objectivized ideas. Cadaverized. The stop of thought which is dynamic. The individual victim of the system. The source of classical injustices. Of the romantic injustices. And the forgetting of interior conquests.

Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes. Routes.

The Carahiban instinct.

Life and death of hypotheses. From the equation I part of the Kosmos to the axiom Kosmos part of I. Subsistence. Knowledge. Anthropophagy.

Against plant elites. In communication with the soil.

We were never catechized. What we really did was Carnival. The Indian dressed as a Senator of the Empire. Pretending to be Pitt. Or featuring in Alencar's operas full of good Portuguese feelings.

We already had communism. We already had the surrealist language. The golden age.
Catiti Catiti
Imara Notiá
Notiá Imara
Ipejú.

Magic and life. We had the relation and the distribution of physical goods, of moral goods, and the goods of dignity. And we knew how to transpose mystery and death with the aid of some grammatical forms. I asked a man what Law was. He replied it was the guarantee of the exercise of possibility. That man was called Galli Matias. I ate him.

Determinism is only absent where there is mystery. But what do we have to do with this?

Against the stories of man, which begin at Cape Finisterra. The undated world. Unsigned. Without Napoleon. Without Caesar.

The fixation of progress through catalogues and television sets. Only machinery. And the blood transfusors.

Against the antagonical sublimations. Brought in caravels.

Against the truth of missionary peoples, defined by the sagacity of an anthropophagite, the Viscount of Cairu:-It is the often repeated lie.

But they who came were not crusaders. They were fugitives from a civilization that we are eating, because we are strong and vengeful as a Jabuti.

If God is the consciousness of the Uncreated Universe, Guaraci is the mother of the living. Jaci is the mother of plants.

We did not have speculation. But we had the power of guessing. We had Politics which is the science of distribution. And a planetary-social system.

The migrations. The escape from tedious states. Against urban sclerosis. Against Conservatories, and tedious speculation.

From William James to Voronoff. The transfiguration of Taboo in totem. Anthropophagy.

The pater families and the creation of the Moral of the Stork: Real ignorance of things + lack of imagination + sentiment of authority before the pro-curious (sic).

It is necessary to depart from a profound atheism to arrive at the idea of God. But the Carahiba did not need. Because he had Guaraci.

The created objective reacts as the Fallen Angels. After Moses wanders. What have we got to do with this?

Before the Portuguese discovered Brazil, Brazil had discovered happiness.

Against the Indian with the torch. The Indian son of Mary, godson of Catherine de Médici and son-in-law of Don Antônio de Mariz.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

In the matriarchy of Pindorama.

Against the Memory source of custom. Personal experience renewed.

We are concretists. Ideas take hold, react, burn people in public squares. Let us suppress ideas and other paralyses. Through the routes. To believe in signs, to believe in the instruments and the stars.

Against Goethe, the mother of the Gracchi, and the Court of Don João VI.

Happiness is the proof of the pudding.

The struggle between what one would call the Uncreated and the Creature illustrated by the permanent contradiction between man and his Taboo. The quotidian love and the capitalist modus vivendi. Anthropophagy. Absorption of the sacred enemy. To transform him into totem. The human adventure. The mundane finality. However, only the pure elites managed to realize carnal anthropophagy, which brings the highest sense of life, and avoids all the evils identified by Freud, catechist evils. What happens is not a sublimation of the sexual instinct. It is the thermometric scale of the anthropophagic instinct. From carnal, it becomes elective and creates friendship. Affectionate, love. Speculative, science. It deviates and transfers itself. We reach vilification. Low anthropophagy agglomerated in the sins of catechism-envy, usury, calumny, assassination. Plague of the so-called cultured and christianized peoples, it is against it that we are acting. Anthropophagi.

Against Anchieta singing the eleven thousand virgins of the sky, in the land of Iracema- the patriarch João Ramalho founder of São Paulo.

Our independence has not yet been proclaimed. Typical phrase of Don João VI:-My son, put this crown on your head, before some adventurer does! We expelled the dynasty. It is necessary to expel the spirit of Bragança, the law and the snuff of Maria da Fonte.

Against social reality, dressed and oppressive, registered by Freud-reality without complexes, without madness, without prostitutions and without the prisons of the matriarchy of Pindorama.

Oswald de Andrade

In Piratininga
Year 374 of the swallowing of the Bishop Sardinha.

1. Original in English [T.N.]

2. Girls: Original in English [T.N.]

Originally published in Revista de Antropofagia, n.1, year 1, May 1928, São Paulo. Translated from the Portuguese by Adriano Pedrosa and Veronica Cordeiro

(the Antropophagis Manifesto was translated into German for the first time in 1990 and appeared in der Kulturzeitung Lettre International)